


How to Embrace a Swamp Creature

by octobervalentine



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Depression, Diary/Journal, Epistolary, Gen, Loss of Parent(s), POV First Person, Past Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 21:13:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18432230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/octobervalentine/pseuds/octobervalentine
Summary: Seto Kaiba is not touched, nor does he want to be touched. He does not touch other people, and he doesn't want to touch them. He doesn't think about it. He doesn't like to think about it. This does not stop the thoughts of touch and being touched from spilling onto notebook paper at five o'clock in the morning.





	How to Embrace a Swamp Creature

**Author's Note:**

> This fic deals explicitly with symptoms of touch aversion experienced by survivors of child abuse who have developed CPTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). There are many references to very specific symptoms including flashbacks, depersonalization, and negative self concept. The abuse from Seto's step father is mentioned and described briefly towards the end of the fic in one line, and it refers directly to choking and being forced to wear a collar. There is also a section towards the end in reference to his parents and their death is implied but there is no explicit description.
> 
> The piece is in itself sombre and dark in tone and I recommend you proceed with caution if you are sensitive to that kind of thing, but it is important for me to emphasize that this is also a recovery narrative. Regardless, please read carefully and be mindful of your own triggers. At the bottom of the fic you'll find a list of resources for abuse survivors, and I hope that you may find something useful if you need it.
> 
> The title of this fic comes from the title of a song by the band The Mountain Goats, of which the lead singer/songwriter is an adult survivor of childhood abuse from a parental figure. The Mountain Goats album The Sunset Tree, which is centered around John Darnielle's experience with childhood abuse from his step father, contains a dedication to survivors of abuse. In the dedication John has the following to say, and I would like to echo his sentiments.
> 
> "Dedicated to any young men and women anywhere who live with people who abuse them, with the following good news:  
> you are going to make it out of there alive  
> you will live to tell your story  
> never lose hope"

It’s 4:54 AM. I have to get ready for work in three hours. I turned out the lights at two AM and stared at the ceiling in silence for as long as I could stand. It’s winter, but I turned on the air conditioning. White noise. I’ll put on something warmer. It’s an easy fix.

Sleep has always eluded me but it hasn’t been a real problem until now. I won’t take the medication, it dulls my senses too much and makes it hard to focus on my work. “It’s good to have around,” they said. I don’t find much comfort in it. The bottle stays in my medicine cabinet. “No screens past 8 PM,” I was told. Insufferable. Completely unreasonable. But the cluster headaches don’t agree with me; even the dimmest setting on my laptop is like hot irons. I can't close my eyes, though, and i have to look at something other than the ceiling. For some reason this journal came to mind. It was given to me two months ago, and I haven’t touched it since. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to write.

I don’t see how it’s supposed to help, and I don’t know why tonight — this morning — is when I decided to pick it up. I’ve never done this before. It never seemed important. But I was given an assignment. That at least feels familiar.

It was suggested that I write a letter to someone I knew, “for myself” and not for their eyes to ever see. I asked for an explanation, elaboration on the logic and the psychology of it. “To help you process,” they said simply. I’m not exactly sure what that means.

It makes little sense to me. But the restlessness vibrates under my skin, and I’ve given up smoking before a critical deadline for some foolhardy reason, and I’m bored. Nothing else has seemed to help. I’ve exhausted all other resources. So here I am.

My last session was odd to say the least. I was asked, seemingly at random, when the last time anyone had touched me was or when I last touched someone else intentionally. Formal handshakes notwithstanding. It was November 20th, around 11AM. I saw my brother off at the airport. It was his first flight alone, for a two week study abroad engagement. I wanted him to take one of the jets with one of my pilots, but he insisted on the commercial flight. He wanted to ride with his friends. It made sense.

He will embrace me — briefly — and with less frequency as he grows older. Sometimes I fear that he’s inherited the same aversions as I have. Most likely he’s simply too old for it. He gets embarrassed. He wants independence. It could be a combination of things. I can't be sure. But that’s between him and the child psychologist I’ve hired for twice a month sessions.

I answered the question and pushed the session along. It was a waste of time, and I didn’t see the point. The topic was left alone and we moved on. For the time being. It didn't come up again in the session that followed yet the question, the motivation behind it, has been on my mind for the last two weeks.

Physical touch is a novelty in my life. It’s extraneous. It seems to be important to most people, and I suppose there’s a logic. Social utility. I don’t find it useful, personally. It’s not a priority. It won’t help me complete any of the thousand tasks I have in a single day. If anything, it’s a distraction. It doesn’t come up often enough to be of any real concern.

A business partner shakes my hand, cold and distant. He’s clammy, stiff. Threatened. Obligated. That has its uses, I can acknowledge. Establishes an order of things, a working relationship. An illusion that we’re on equal footing. It’s an easy way to assert dominance. This is my day. These are my interactions. Pragmatic, utilitarian. Formal.

It may surprise you to know when I’m not in the office I buy my own coffee. It’s faster that way, and I’d rather do it myself. My secretary still gets it wrong half of the time. He’s new. He’ll learn. I ignore the persistent stares when I cross to the register to order. It’s routine, automatic. The employees are no longer phased.

Yesterday was different. The barista’s fingertips grazed mine accidentally and she apologized profusely. I had the unexpected thought that I wished she wouldn’t. It’s uncomfortable. It wouldn’t have been of any note if it weren’t for her upset. The interaction intruded on my thoughts throughout the day and well into the evening after I had left the office.

It’s becoming an increasingly persistent thought. I’m reticent to call it a fixation. It’s starting to feel like one. I can admit that an idea can take hold easily and I have difficulty leaving it alone. It turns over in my mind and I sift through it, over and over. Looking for the holes in its logic, a way to explain it or categorize it neatly. This thought, the concept of touch and its function, has been difficult to parse. I can't seem to leave it alone.

Until recently, these past two months that I’ve been in proximity with you and your little friends, it was never an issue. It didn’t cross my mind. It’s easy to forget what it feels like to be touched by others when you spend the majority of the day alone in an office in front of the glow of a computer screen or at the front of a boardroom. In front of TV cameras blinded by hot lights, in a costume at a distance from the film crew and the millions of strangers to which you are a household name and not much more than a media personality. A caricature.

It’s utterly bizarre, in a word, to sit in a room with you and your friends watching some ludicrous action movie. It doesn’t hold my attention. You do. It’s hard for me to grasp not necessarily the acts themselves, but the ease of which you all touch each other. An absolute wealth of physical affection — offered and given freely with such frequency. You crowd each other’s space, and you don’t pull away. It’s not too much. It seems like you can never get enough.

There are two categories of touch which I’ve observed among your group. The first is more overt. An elbow nudged, a shoulder squeezed, knees touching around the playmat during a friendly duel. The second is more puzzling. It’s more subtle, but no less deliberate. Prolonged, sustained contact that can easily last upwards of an hour or even longer.

Laying on the same bed or couch, sides pressed together in the small space. Sitting in someone’s lap or leaning against their chest. Curling into each other during a movie, for the entire two to three hour runtime, hours spent touching each other longer than the collective time I’ve spent being touched by anyone in my entire life. It’s impossible to grasp the ubiquity. It’s impossible to visualize that ubiquity in my own life. It’s beyond my reach, to imagine or understand how it would be to have such an overabundance of this contact that I don’t hold my breath on the rare occasion where someone else’s skin touches my own. I think about it more than I’d like to admit.

I’ve wondered recently if you ever do. I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think you truly grasp the gulf between our experiences in this regard. You don’t think about it. You don’t have to.

I don’t imagine that you spend any real amount of time thinking about touch in this way, the lack of it I mean. Why would you? It’s a part of your daily life. It’s constant. People want to touch you. People aren’t afraid to touch you. You can’t count the number of times you’ve been touched by another human being in the past month on one hand. I can. Sometimes there’s no counting to be done at all.

Touch is not important in my life. It’s obnoxious for the concept to intrude my thought process as much as it has as of late. It’s not important. I don’t want it, I wouldn’t even know what to do with it and the thought alone makes me nauseous. But it’s hard for me, I can admit, to look at what other people have that I don’t and wonder. It always has been. I don’t want to be touched with any regularity or frequency. I don’t know how things would be any different. I don’t like to think of it. But it doesn't stop me from wondering.

I see you more and more each week with your friends as you diligently attempt to entangle me in your lives. When I watch you crowd into each other and touch and be touched by each other so readily, it’s hard for me to imagine any of you awake at 5:28 AM after 27 hours without rest, unable to close your eyes because of the images that surface when you do.

It’s hard to imagine you waking up in the dead of night when you do manage to sleep, sheets soaked in cold sweat and your heart rate spiking dangerously, the cries of a scared child that no longer exists ringing in your ears. Feeling the persistent abrasion of a heavy leather collar or the all too familiar squeeze of large hands around your throat. The last time you can remember being touched with any regularity or frequency.

It’s harder still to imagine that you’d ever fear that when one of your precious friends touches your bare skin you’ll contaminate them. You don’t fear that the stain of your ugly, pathetic past, all your failures and the filth of all the wrong you’ve done will rub off on them. You don’t worry about soiling them with what you are. You don’t feel guilt and shame like dirt under your fingernails, like scum over every inch of skin that will never wash away no matter how long and hard you scrub under scalding water. No matter if you scraped yourself raw.

I’ve tried. It will never come off. I will never be clean.

I tell myself I’m not jealous, I’m not resentful. I don’t care, and I don’t want it. I don’t want to be touched. It doesn’t stop me from wondering what it’s like to be you and wake up with the knowledge of the unshakable, unconditional love and affection of your friends and family. It’s innate. You don’t think about it. You don’t have to. It’s not your first thought in the morning that you wonder what it’s like not to wake up alone.

You can’t know what it’s like to remember the exact date and time you were last touched with any intention, with any desire to touch or be touched. Yout can’t know. You can’t know, and you’ll never know, what it is to lack something so basic to the whole of humanity and so commonplace in their lives that they couldn't imagine what it's like to live without it.

Do you know what it is to be alone? Not lonely. Loneliness implies a lack of permanence. I’m referring to a lasting, consistent state of being entirely set apart from the rest of the human race in a very base way. Removed entirely. Severed completely. I don’t think you do. I can’t imagine you this way, thinking these things, when you and the others touch each other so readily. You cling to each other and drape across one another, sleep next to each other and hold hands and kiss. You take it for granted. Like it’s expected. Like it couldn’t possibly ever be taken away.

When I was young, younger than my brother is now and before he was even born, I had difficulty sleeping. I told you. It’s been a lifelong issue. To help with this, my mother would lay in bed with me most nights and hold me until I fell asleep. When she thought I had finally drifted off she would try to leave, but I would hold onto her. “Five more minutes,” I would say. “Five more minutes”.

The things I wouldn’t do for five more minutes. It’s a short list.

My brother tells me he doesn’t remember her face. We don’t have any pictures. They were taken, and never found. Probably destroyed along with everything else we brought from the orphanage. I try to describe her to him, my father too. I don’t remember them as well as I think I used to. But I do remember feeling safe in my mother's arms at night. I don’t feel safe at night anymore.

I don’t like thinking about it. I don’t like thinking about the past. It’s not useful. It’s a distraction. It’s painful. It makes me weak.

I am jealous.  
I do resent.  
I do care.  
I do want.

But it simply does not matter. It’s not important, and it has no practical use. There is no point in wanting what I can’t have. It is only a distraction. I don’t know why I'm still thinking about this, and I don't know why I sat here in this cold room writing meaningless drivel until 6:42 AM.

My eyes are dry, tired. Strangely I feel like sleep might actually be a possibility now. But my alarm will go off in a little over an hour. I might as well get up now. At least there was something to pass the time.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this work as an adult survivor of child abuse who has been recently diagnosed with CPTSD, and it's important to for me to emphasize my intent behind writing this piece and offer resources. It was cathartic to process my own grief and childhood trauma through fiction with a character I relate heavily to in this regard, and I wrote it with that in mind. But what's really important for me is the hope that if you're out there and went through what I did, or if you're still experiencing it, you can maybe find some kind of recognition or solidarity in knowing you're not alone. It probably feels like there's no one to talk to, and it's hard to reach out. Do it anyway. Abusers thrive on the silence of their victims and the complacency of onlookers. Don't give it to them. 
> 
> Information about CPTSD:  
> https://www.bridgestorecovery.com/post-traumatic-stress-disorder/complex-ptsd-symptoms-behavior-and-treatment/  
> https://www.beautyafterbruises.org/what-is-cptsd
> 
> Child abuse survivor and mental health resources:  
> http://www.generationfive.org/resources/child-abuse-resources/  
> https://survivingabuse.org/resources/  
> https://www.thetrevorproject.org/  
> https://www.translifeline.org/  
> https://www.nctsn.org/


End file.
